Organized by the Benetton Studi Ricerche Foundation and curated by Gherardo Ortalli – historian, professor emeritus at Ca' Foscari University, scientific director of the study and research sector that the Foundation dedicates to the history of gaming – with the international collaboration of other scholars, the exhibition analyzes in a clear and engaging way a phenomenon that affects the lives of people and societies.
«Playing is an innate and fundamental necessity of living, as demonstrated by the spontaneity of play and its formative role from early childhood» explains Gherardo Ortalli. «In fact, playing pervades every aspect and moment of life of societies and their history. Ingenuity and complexity of the game are elements that mix in many ways and a particular expression of it, to be followed carefully for its social repercussions, is the combination of the game with money, stakes, chance, bets. In essence, gambling is an aspect that has always accompanied the life of society, albeit in different and more or less regulated forms.
On the other hand, the danger of gambling is undoubted due to the heavy repercussions it can have when practiced out of control with strong personal and social risks. The relevance of ludopathy (the disease of gambling) is proof of the problems that can arise with serious consequences. However, one must not think that the problem of gambling is something of today. The invention of dice as a game of chance was traced back by classical culture to the time of the Trojan War.
We have always tried to keep gambling practices under control. The states have intervened in the most diverse ways and the current methods, with the public authorities committed to administering and controlling the practices of the money game, begin in medieval Europe and last in their assumptions until today.
Obviously the game of chance which is the basis of the most dangerous gamble can be expressed in many ways that are absolutely not dangerous and indeed socially useful. Christmas bingo is certainly not a risk for the community, but bingo needed legislation, not just fiscal legislation. The patronage lottery is certainly not comparable to the large state lotteries that put millions up for grabs, however the mechanism is the same and this exhibition intends to highlight by sample, with the display of selected testimonies, how the practices have developed and how public control has operated (and in Italy in particular) in an effort to regulate the game of chance.
This also meant seeing how the public finances have always derived a financial profit from the control, concession or ban on gambling. The aspects of the problem are many. Consider, for example, how the shares of money that public bodies withhold on concessions and the sums that are wagered are the only tax that the taxpayer pays voluntarily. Revenues become fundamental income both for the most difficult moments (for example lotteries in times of war and patriotic times), but also for public interest enterprises, as in the case, for example, of lottery revenues which in papal Rome are served by eighteenth century for the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes or for the Trevi Fountain or for the Palazzo della Consulta (now the seat of the Constitutional Court)».
This great social history is the subject of an exhibition full of stimuli, suggestions, testimonies, which aims to present in an easy and pleasant way the complexity of a phenomenon always of extraordinary importance in the life of society and today accentuated by the current tools of possible chance: from instant lotteries to those via the internet, from scratch cards to television roulette - modern heirs of the bets on who should be elected to lead the city or to the pontifical function -, up to the football pools (which today seem archaic), and other ever-evolving practices.
Important loans will come from Italian and foreign collections.
From the Civic Museums of Treviso comes the grandiose lottery draw in Piazza San Marco, a masterpiece by Eugenio Bosa. Thanks to the collaboration with the National Museum of the Salce Collection, some advertising posters from the early twentieth century will be exhibited.
Ancient documents and games will come from the archives of the Belgian National Lottery in Brussels as well as from the Valvassori Collection of the Classense Library in Ravenna, from the Alberto Milano Collection, from that of the Bolognese collector Silvio Berardi, and of scholars such as Gherardo Ortalli himself, Alberto Fiorin and Manfred Zollinger, as well as from the Dal Negro playing card factory.
«The Benetton Foundation comes to this exhibition» affirms the director Marco Tamaro «with the authority that derives from thirty years of research at the highest level on the history of the game. Since 1987, i.e. from the start of the Foundation's activity - which this year celebrates its thirtieth anniversary -, under the guidance of Professor Gaetano Cozzi (1922-2001) and Professor Gherardo Ortalli, research has been conducted and published on the history of the game. The Foundation also publishes “Ludica. Annals of the history and civilization of gaming”, one of the most prestigious journals and scientific collections at an international level».
